As I've told you in the past, there are two locations in the New Testament in which our Lord gave this model prayer. One was in Galilee in the Sermon on the Mount, and that is recorded in the sixth chapter of Matthew verses 9 to 13. Here very likely in Judea many months later, Jesus again instructs with regard to this model prayer. Luke's prayer is more brief than Matthew's. Matthew gives us the fullest rendition of this model prayer. Luke leaves out some of the elements that Matthew includes. And I think for our instruction, even though we're studying Luke, we'll borrow from Matthew the parts that aren't here so that we can understand the fullness of this model prayer, certainly because the Lord gave us the two gospels, He intended us to blend these together.
Let's look at verses 1 to 4. "It came about that while He was praying in a certain place after He had finished, one of His disciples said to Him, 'Lord, teach us to pray just as John also taught his disciples.' And He said to them, 'When you pray, say, Father, hallowed be Thy name, Thy Kingdom come, Give us each day our daily bread and forgive us our sins for we ourselves also forgive everyone who is indebted to us and lead us not into temptation.'"
There is the prayer, and you recognize by listening to Luke's version that some things are left out, such as Our Father who art in heaven, such as Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven, and such as Thine be the power and the glory and the Kingdom forever and ever, Amen. So we'll borrow those from Matthew as we consider this prayer. But for today, we have already worked our way down into verse 2, we have already, last week, considered the "Our Father who art in heaven," and we talked about what it means to go to God as a loving Father.
We now come to the first petition in the prayer, the first supplication, the first request, "Hallowed be Thy name." By the way, that opens up so much truth in the Bible that one could spend a lifetime simply discussing the implications of that single statement. So what we're going to do this morning is to condense it greatly.
Let me begin by saying the Bible repeatedly teaches us the astonishing wonder of prayer. Abraham's servant prayed and Rebecca appeared. Jacob prayed and prevailed and Esau's mind was turned after twenty years of vengeance. Moses prayed and Amalek was struck. Joshua was struck and Achan was discovered. Hannah prayed and Samuel was born. David prayed and Ahithophel, his enemy, was defeated. Asa prayed and victory was gained. Jehoshaphat prayed and God turned away his enemies. Isaiah and Hezekiah prayed and a hundred and eighty-five thousand Assyrians were dead in twelve hours. Daniel prayed and lions were muzzled. Daniel prayed again and the prophecy of the rest of history down to Messiah was given to him in the seventy weeks prophecy. Mordecai and Ester prayed and Haman who wanted to destroy the Jews was hanged on his own gallows in a mere three days. Ezra prayed at Ebronah(?) and God answered. Nehemiah prayed and the king's heart was softened in a moment. Elijah prayed and a three-year drought came, he prayed again and it rained. Elisha prayed and a child's soul came back to life. Believers prayed and Peter was released from prison and appeared at the door, and so it goes, the chronicle of the wonder of prayer all through Scripture and even until now.
We are familiar with prayer, we understand that God hears and answers prayer. We know the Bible says you have not because you ask not. It says pray without ceasing, pray at all times, in everything by prayer and supplication let your request be known to God. We understand all of that. But there's so much more to understand. Most people focus on how prayer works, not on what its purpose is. In fact, one person said that praying for most people is like sailors pumping because the ship leaks. Prayer is sort of a crisis operation, a sort of a last ditch approach. That's so wrong. And I think most people assume that prayer, and they're even taught this, that prayer is primarily for us. It's our way to cash in. It's our way to activate God. It's our way to get what we want. It's our way to put God in a place where He fulfills our desires, longings, dreams and ambitions. Of course that's wrong as well. Prayer is not for us, it is primarily for God. It is not for us to get what we want, it is for Him to display His glory through meeting our needs. Prayer really in the main is communion with the living God of the universe, really an unfathomable privilege, living our lives, as it were, in the constant awareness of God who is equally and perfectly aware of us. John Chrysostom, the early church father, wrote, "A monarch vested in glory is far less illustrious than a kneeling ennobled saint who is adorned by communion with his God." He says, "Consider how agust a privilege it is when angels are presence and archangels throng around, when cherubim and seraphim encircle with their blaze the throne of God, that a mortal may approach with unrestrained confidence and converse with heaven's dread sovereign. Oh what honor was ever conferred like this." Prayer is this incredible privilege of communing with God on behalf of His glory and bringing our wants insofar as they fit in to His glorious purpose.
Prayer is really coming into the presence of God to submit to His will. True prayer brings the mind into immediate contemplation of God's glory and true prayer should hold it there until the believer's soul is properly impressed. The object of all prayer is that God be glorified. We've been sort of laying out a key verse, John 14:13, "Whatever you ask in My name," Jesus said, "that will I do that the Father may be glorified." And that tells us the purpose of prayer. Jesus said in His highly priestly prayer in John 17, "I have glorified You on earth, now restore Me to the glory I had with You before the world began." Prayer is first and foremost a recognition of God's majestic glory and it is an act of submission to that glory. All petitions, all supplications, all passions, all requests, all needs are subject to God's glory. "Hallowed be Thy name, Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done," it's about Your name, Your will, Your Kingdom, and then and only then is it, "Give us our daily bread, forgive us our trespasses, lead us not into temptation." The "us" follows the "You." In the first place, prayer is true, pure worship. It begins and ends and middles with worship. It starts with forgetting self. The first thing you do when you come to God in prayer, acknowledging Him as Father who cares about you and who has all the resources you need is to confess that the priority is not you but Him, because the first thing you say is, "Hallowed be Your name...Hallowed be Your name."
This is consistent with what we've been learning about coming to salvation. Jesus said, "If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself." It starts that way and it keeps going that way and it never changes. When you come to Christ it is the end of you for good. And from then on your prayers are, "Father, hallowed be Your name, Your Kingdom come, Your will be done," that is to say your agenda is all that matters to me. And however it is that my daily bread can come and my forgiveness can come, and my protection can come consistent with Your will, that is my prayer. Prayer is to lift up the soul to honor and glorify God, not to bend God to my agenda. The whole prayer centers on God, "Our Father" indicates God is source. "Hallowed be Thy name," God is sacred. "Thy Kingdom come," God is sovereign. "Thy will be done," God is superior. "Give us each day our daily bread," God is supporter. "Forgive us our sins," God is Savior. "Lead us not into temptation," God is our shelter. "For Thine is the Kingdom, the power and the glory forever, amen," God is supreme, it is about God.
And what is remarkable about this text is that the disciples of Jesus didn't know how to pray. And they were not unlike many people today, if not most who claim to be Jesus' disciples. There was one of them on behalf of the rest who said to the Lord, "Lord, teach us to pray." John the Baptist had to teach his disciples to pray, now we need to know how to pray. How is it these Jewish people with the Old Testament didn't know how to pray? Because true religion, the true faith of the Old Testament had been supplanted by an apostate form of Judaism led by religious hypocrites and prayer had been reduced to formulas, rituals, ceremonies and vain repetition. And that's all they knew, were the recited, heartless, almost mindless prayers. When they heard Jesus pray, they heard something completely different than that. And on this occasion they, no doubt, had been eavesdropping while He was praying in a certain place or they wouldn't have known when He finished in order to approach Him with their concern. They knew that what kind of prayer they had experienced, what had been passed down to them in the traditions of their apostate form of Judaism wasn't anything like the way Jesus prayed. And so they said, "Teach us to pray the way You pray, the way John taught his disciples to pray, the way really the Old Testament also taught true believers to pray.
And so Jesus gives them a model prayer. It's not just a prayer to be prayed, you can do that, it's a framework on which to base all your prayers. It's a skeleton on which to hang the flesh of all your intercession. And I'll obviously show you that as we go through phrase by phrase.
Last week we started where Jesus said to start. In Luke it says, "When you pray say, "Father." Matthew's larger statement is, "Our Father who art in heaven." You start with a recognition that God is the source, that God is your loving, caring Father who has no limits on what He can provide His beloved children. All prayer begins with the recognition that God cares. If we didn't believe that, why bother Him? We know of that, we spoke of that in detail last week. He is a compassionate, caring, loving, gracious, merciful Father who seeks the best for His children and has no limits upon His provision. And so we start with a recognition that God cares. We say "Abba, Papa," we come with intimacy and acceptance into His loving presence.
But then going from God as fatherly source, we come immediately to this phrase, "Hallowed be Thy name." And we see God not as source, but God as sacred. You know, you can get a little carried away with the intimacy of God as Father, a little carried away with the sentimentalism that might be attached to saying, "Abba, Papa." And so to guard against abusing or overusing, or misunderstanding that intimacy, immediately our Lord says, "After you have acknowledged that He is your tender-hearted, compassionate, loving Abba, you need to remember this, hallowed be His name." It's really the perfect balance. And this, by the way, is the first petition. This is the first request, "Hallowed be Your name." And it's on God's behalf. I come on Your behalf. This is then the fundamental duty in prayer. Self is immediately removed and God is the priority. The glory of God, the hallowing of His great name is the foundation of all prayers, it is the ultimate end of all things. Every request, no matter what it is, must be subordinated to this one, be in harmony with this one, or in pursuit of this one. You cannot pray for anything unless the glory and honor of God is dominant in that prayer. When you cherish the desire for God to be glorified, and God to be honored, you will then ask only for those things which God will see as the means to that end. It's a warning against self-seeking. It's a warning against asserting your will and your ambition and your goals and your dreams. God does not exist in heaven to fulfill your dreams, contrary to what you hear so much today. He does not exist in heaven to give you what you want. He exists in heaven and has redeemed you and made you His child in order that in you He might display His will and His Kingdom and His glory. "Hallowed be Thy name."
Now we say that, we sing that, it's very familiar, in fact it's that kind of phrase that's so familiar we might not really understand what it means but think we do because we use it so much. So let's look a little more into this. It is more than just some official affirmation. It's more than just "Long live the King." Or some other accolade that might be paid to a monarch or a ruler. It is not passing homage. It is not a casual bit of religious routine. It is really a recognition of a whole sphere of respect and reference and awe and appreciation for who God is. It is a large, it is a sweeping kind of concept. Name is not just a title and hallowed is not just a passing thought. In fact, the Jews did understand this. They...they didn't quite understand the intimacy of God, they didn't understand the "Abba" part. But they did understand the transcendence of God. They did understand that God was high and holy and exalted. That message got through to them through the constant reminder of the presence of God in the Holy of Holies to which only a High Priest could go once a year which indicated to them with great clarity that God was hidden behind veils. They understood the sacredness of God. And they understood His name to be hallowed. They understood His name to be sacred only in a superficial way. So enormous was the respect of the ancient Hebrews for the actual name of God, Yahweh, the tetra-grammaton, the four Hebrew letters, so enormous was the respect for that name that they wouldn't speak it. The Jew wouldn't say the name. That wasn't the point, but they did that to everything. They turned everything into something superficial, something ceremonial, something functional because their religion never touched their hearts, they never really knew God. And so, they knew the name of God to be sacred, but their way to deal with that was just not say Yahweh, but that's how superficial religion always functions. You have God in your mouth but not in your heart. They did realize the sacredness of the name but not the God behind the name.
You've got to go deeper than that. This is not about don't say My name. In biblical times, as even today, Thy name stands for far more than a title, far more than a word. And when the Bible gives the command to not take the Lord's name in vain, it doesn't just mean don't use God's name to swear or to speak commonly or basely. What does the name of God mean? Well it means all that He is. The name stood for the whole character of the person. We still feel that way today. In fact, when someone speaks evil of a person, denigrates that person, brings false accusation on that person, destroys that person's reputation, that person will respond by saying, "You have ruined my name." We understand that. And they may sue because our courts allow for lawsuits to be brought against people for the defamation of character. You can't just destroy someone's name. We understand the implications of that. If you say things that aren't true about a person, the next time the people heard you say that hear the name of that person, they're going to have attitudes toward that person that are basically the product of your input. A person's name is to be protected. It's not that the name John or Bill or Sally or Mary is to be protected, it's that all that the person is behind the name. So when we say God, we're talking about all that He is, the personal character of God. The name of God stands for His nature, His attributes, His character, His personality. In Exodus chapter 34, Moses was calling on the name of the Lord in verse 5 of Exodus 34, he called on the name of the Lord. He was saying, "Lord, Lord, Lord," praying. But he wasn't just calling a name for a namesake. He was desirous to reach God and see the display of who God was. And so God responds. The Lord comes and here's how the Lord speaks to Moses, "The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate, gracious, slow to anger, abounding in loving kindness and truth who keeps loving kindness for thousands, forgives iniquity, transgression, sin will be no means leave the guilty unpunished, visits the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the grandchildren to third and fourth generation." Amazing. Moses says God, God, God, and God says, "Here I come, the Lord, the Lord God, gracious," all these attributes, this is who He is, this is His name. And Moses then makes haste, bows low, worships God. Then says, "Lord, I pray..." and gives his request. First he calls on the name of the Lord to be hallowed. God responds by identifying who He is which has a lot to do with what kind of prayers He'll answer. God puts Himself on display. Moses hallows the name of God.
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